Thursday, August 25, 2016

Luke Kennardis a poet and writer of fiction who was born in Kingston Upon Thames in 1981 and grew up in Luton. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005 and his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers was published later that year by Stride. His second collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie was published by Salt in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted. The Migraine Hotelwas published in 2009 and A Lost Expression was released in 2012 alongside Holophin which won the Saboteur Novella award that year. His fiction and poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, the Times Literary Supplement and The National. He has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once per-decade list. His fifth collection of poems, Cain, will be published summer 2016 and his first novel, The Transition, will be published by 4th Estate in 2017.

His poem “additional versions of the enchanted component” appears in the tenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “additional versions of the enchanted component.”

A: I love almost every vice except for the desire for power. I’m greedy for money, I eat and drink too much, I’m half crazy with lust, the only reason I don’t gamble is because I know I’d lose absolutely everything and destroy my family. But power doesn’t interest me at all, except as a means to getting more of all the aforementioned stuff, and seeing as they’re not qualities I’m exactly proud of or want to cultivate, I can’t even appreciate wanting power on that base level. So writing poems from the perspective of a politician looking back on their career is an attempt to locate and understand that impulse within myself (the one I assume I don’t have, which may only be because I’m in a position of privilege which denies its own built-in power). “additional versions” is the second sequence in a long collection of poems from this point of view. I wrote them using a kind of augmented collage technique where you have various contrasting texts around you which you can reach for whenever you’re feeling stuck, and you treat your own lines and observations as another text, giving it no greater status than the cheap novel, the political treatise, the technical poetics magazine and old Peanuts collection open on your desk. So it’s fairly aleatory, but you find your own path through it, you play one off the other and you build a picture through the juxtapositions. I think it’s a technique which comes fairly naturally to everyone – like it’s something you enjoy doing as a child which you maybe forget about. It’s something I did a lot in my first collection in 2005, but I’d sort of wandered away from it until recently.

Q: What made you wander back? And how does this differ from the work you’ve done since your first collection?

A: I wrote my first collection in my dad’s attic. He’s been self-employed as a translator for 30 years and his walls are lined with obscure books and dictionaries. He’s currently studying Sami, the family of indigenous languages spoken in Lapland. For fun. Anyway, point is, whenever I was stuck I’d go and pick a book off the wall and flick through it until a phrase caught my attention, and this would provide the next plot-point, the next image or swerve. And then what I did in three collections since then, from 2006 to 2012 drifted more into surrealism/absurdism without the cut-ups, sometimes even lyric-y, but I hope stranger than that, less fixed. But I have a tendency to lapse into self-parody, to get bored, and I feel a little bored by those collections now, and I wasn’t writing very much at all until I started this long project on poems about Cain, which is being edited now. And I was using the long-form anagram for a big section of that MS (inspired by Gregory Betts, who came and read at the university I teach in in the UK), and I think that’s what got me back into looking at process again. I’ve always admired innovative poetry, even the stuff I struggle with (which is I guess the point), especially the awkward stuff that doesn’t fit easily into a movement, and it’s not as if collage has been “done” and has no more use. I wanted to see how the book selection altered the mood and atmosphere of the poetry, so I set some categories (a book of high-end poetics criticism; a non-fiction book of the geopolitical horror genre; a Peanuts collection; a pre-19th c. fiction text and a 20th/21st c. fiction text) and decided to use this same set of categories (but different texts) for each sequence of five or so poems. But all of the sources are distorted and blended in with my own lines (and the voice of this central character who I wanted to explore), which is where the revision comes in.

Q: I’m curious about you, as a poet, being the child of a translator. Has any of your father’s work, directly or indirectly, influenced the ways in which you see language and writing?

A: My dad is a freelance translator and takes whatever’s going, so he’s only ever worked on a handful of books, and all non-fiction (history, etc.) He’s fluent in a dozen languages but can translate around 30 into English. He’s been doing this for thirty-five years, so long before there were online tools to help with the basics. Sadly I have absolutely none of his talent (or discipline) for languages, although he tried to teach me Italian and French while I was growing up. That said, being surrounded by books, and having volumes of Italian and Russian fiction and poetry in the house were clearly formative for me. And also just that love of language, of the way our cultural differences map onto our words for things and ways of putting things, all those ‘untranslatable’ proverbs and figures of speech – that was always a part of my life, a part of our conversation even when I was a little child. He’s a very kind man and was always encouraging of my writing. When I was a toddler he worked on an old typewriter and whenever he’d upgrade he’d pass the old one on to me. For years he had this type-writer / word processor which saved onto 5 inch floppy discs and had a single strip of green digital display so it could show you about five words at a time, and instead of the hammers it had the letters on a sort of metal golfball and would type up whole documents like an autopiano. Then he upgraded to a much smaller Sharp thing with a blue screen that could display maybe a paragraph at a time and saved onto 3.5 inch discs, and I got that when he got his first PC. So from the age of, say, five, I’d sit up in my room day and night writing long science fiction stories instead of forming any meaningful relationships with my peers.

Q: Over the years you’ve done extensive work via the prose poem. What is it about the prose poem that appeals? What is it that you feel the prose poem allows you to do or explore that the more traditional lyric (or, arguably, more straightforward prose) does not?

A: I just really love it as a form. I write fiction and poetry with line-breaks too, so I’m not a purist in the Francis Ponge mould, but I feel like I’m using a completely different part of my brain when I write prose poetry. I like its expansiveness, its freedom. The fact that it can incorporate some heavy linguistic innovation alongside weird parables and fables as well as direct autobiography. There’s a Jennifer L. Knox sequence called ‘Cars’ which I use with my students to get them to look back on their own lives through a particular lens and it introduces them to the form’s possibilities really well. Mairead Byrnes’s Talk Poetry is one of my all time favourite collections. I like the rebellious streak in prose poetry too.

I think it comes down to the fact that in fiction you’re free to do pretty much whatever you like... You kind of expect an intelligent reader who won’t be put off by being challenged. In poetry I often feel like you come up against a certain cultural conservatism... I feel this from sharing work with people and sometimes from what my students like and dislike. People are almost offended by a poem that won’t behave itself formally. And the thing is quite often when you look at poetry by avowed contemporary formalists, it doesn’t even scan! It’s got nothing on the storybooks I read to my sons at night. (You can take Clive James’s recent climate-change-denial poem as a good example of that). So, it’s like, what are they even insisting on here? The only thing I’d fail my students for (i.e. insisting on using a rhyme scheme and doing it horribly)? I think it was the critic Stephen Fredman who said the prose poem is “at war with decorum.”: when the decorum in question is bullshit that’s particularly important.

Q: You mention Knox and Byrne: what other poets have influenced the ways in which you put together a poem, or even a collection?

A: I wasn’t massively interested in poetry until a tutor leant me the first New York School anthology and the selected Ashbery. Before that we had the big Bloodaxe anthologies of contemporary British poetry at school (The New Poetry, 1993) and a lot of it left me fairly cold, except for the Scottish poet Frank Kuppner and an English poet John Ash (who was very influenced by Ashbery and now lives in Istanbul, I think). More recently I’ve got interested in collections with a narrative running through them like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. I teach an MA module called Poem as Story – Story as Poem where we look at hybrid works like that. And I suppose that was quite a big influence on me when I was putting together Cain which came out in June.

Q: After more than a half-dozen trade books over the past decade-plus, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I like what I’m writing now. I feel like pursuing the collage thing and maybe working this sequence into a book length collection over the next couple of years. I’ve got a novel coming out next March. If that does okay I suppose I’ll be under some pressure to work on fiction for a while. But, if nothing else, working as a poet gives you a healthy dose of pessimism and realism: the novel could be as big a commercial flop as the poetry. And that has to be beside the point; I think you always have to keep in mind that there are literally millions of other writers who’d like any attention, any readers whatsoever. I got a little despondent around the time of my 4th collection in 2012 because it sold, I’m not exaggerating, a tenth of what my first three collections did individually. I felt like I’d tried to do something a little different and then I thought, but what does that even matter if almost nobody wants to engage with the work? There were various reasons for it sinking without a trace (it was an attractive over-priced hardback and the paperback didn’t come out in time; the publisher, Salt, were in the process of dropping their whole poetry list; some other things). And I probably didn’t do enough to promote it either. I probably have close friends who don’t know about that book. But that’s the mid-career jinx, isn’t it? The people asking you for references, blurbs, advice, etc, outweighs your readership by about two to one. With Cain I guess I thought, well, clearly there’s not a soul who’s going to buy Another Collection of Poems by Luke Kennard so if I’m going to bother bringing out another trade book at all it has to be something different. I mean that sounds very cynical. I was writing the Cain poems anyway, so it was maybe more of a coincidence. And of course the alternative is to do things on a very small scale, bring out gorgeous hand-made books in print runs of 25 and just be happy with what you’re creating.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: That’s such a good way of putting it. I go back to Berryman’s The Dream Songs a lot. The Yale anthology 20th Century French Poetry gets fairly well thumbed. I get a lot of my energy from reading new stuff too. Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women and David McGimpsey’s Asbestos Heights are currently blowing my face off.

Her “three untitled poems after Vasko Popa” appear in the tenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “three untitled poems after Vasko Popa.”

A: I first encountered Vasko Popa in my University of Ottawa English 4398 creative writing workshop with Seymour Mayne in 2001. We were asked to study specific poets. I ran across the anthology The Poetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe, Daniel Weissbort, ed. (Anvil Press, 1991). I was particularly interested with the way these poets (in translation) handled the brutality and trauma of the first and second world wars. They had various strategies to speak out against injustices, to deal with the horrors of concentration camps, but they had to get past the censors. Vasko Popa, in his series “Quartz Pebble,” and in other poems, personified abstractions. I’ve always been fascinated with this. In a time when censorship is increasingly on the rise, not just from authorities but also within peer groups, it is hard not to think about this time as a constraining era of suppression and repression. I’m fascinated with the way Popa used geometry in his poetry, such as “The Little Box Poem”: “In your four-sided emptiness/We turn distance into nearness/Forgetfulness into memory”

Q: You’ve long been exploratory in your writing, and utilizing large projects. Are these poems part of a larger, longer project?

A: Those are the first three, but I already have a few ideas for more. I thought I was writing only the one poem, but that poem suggested another poem, etc. so...possibly.

Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: I’m going through a period of attempting minimalism, which I’ve been working on since the summer of 2015. working with shorter lines, little punctuation or staccato breaks. before that I was in a more accumulative, expansive horror vacui phase.

Q: What prompted the shift towards minimalism? And when you say minimalism, are you thinking of a particular lyric density, or a complete minimalism, a la Nelson Ball?

A: For the last two years, I’ve been working with poet, playwright, novelist Tom Walmsley and reading his work. His ability to say a lot with few words has been a great influence. We even wrote haiku together, a form I couldn’t stand before Tom’s influence. Also, I tend to be a rebel. I don’t like to do things the same way. My motto is “expect the unexpected.”

Ok, googling “lyric density” and found this from a piece on song writing: “the number of words that must fit within a measure.” I like the idea of that. How does it apply to poetry? Perhaps on the level of sound, number of syllables that fit into a breath. I’ve always played with the line and the breath in my writing, creating a line long enough to make the reader breathless at the end of it. Minimalism allows for more breathing room. That’s my current thought anyway.

A number of years ago Stephen Ross Smith gave a great reading at the Manx Pub as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series from his fluttertongue series of books. There were a lot of pauses and silences in his work. It made the words resonate more and as a reader, I was able to have more time to think about what I was hearing.

I’m just trying to see if I can take up as small a space as possible while having imagery that resonates and ripples outward. I’m a small person but can pack a powerful punch. Just before this phase, I was interested in trying to work in conversational words in my poetry. Stuff like adverbs, repetition of words that play no function except for connection or reassurance with the listener. Now I’m paring things down. perhaps leaving more space for the reader/listener.

After my health crisis in 2009, I felt the need to declutter, to get rid of items in my life that were extraneous. to eschew the material in favour of the spiritual. This need is now working its way into my poetry. When I plummet, I want to do it lightly and leave no trace. perhaps the next phase of my writing will be inkless.

Q: With a published trade collection and a growing mound of chapbooks to your credit over the past decade or so, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see yourself headed?

A: I don't know how to answer the question of how my work has developed. Each work, for me, is its own thing. What is the mark of growth or development for a person who does any kind of creative work? am I better at it now than I was a decade ago? I’m more opinionated about what I’m doing perhaps, but I always have beginner mind. Every work I try is something new. As long as I’m not boring myself or an audience at a reading, I’m ok.

If development means getting the opportunity to have more work published or do more readings, perhaps there things have improved. But to be honest, I’m fine with being obscure and in the margins. It’s easier to try a somersault on a high wire and fall if no one’s looking than it is if all eyes are on you. I have a few manuscripts at the bottom of publishers’ slush piles, which probably need retooling and sent out again so they float to the top.

I have other manuscripts I should probably revisit, and I will when the mood strikes me. The only kind of development that matters to me is to be more open to exploration and trying new things. The day I say no to exploration, I might as well stop writing and start a parking lot business. I wouldn’t mind having more books published, but aside from sending stuff out and hoping it resonates, I have no control over that. If I get impatient and feel that something needs to be out there, I can always publish it myself, like I did recently with my erotic novel, A World of Yes, which I published as an e-book through DevilHouse (imprint of AngelHousePress).

I have no particular plans, I just go where the work takes me. I become fascinated or obsessed with something, a piece of art, music, film, a snippet of conversation, the biography of some obscure person or an image, and I let my curiosity lead me to reading and thinking and writing about it.

I’m fascinated right now with hybrid forms that resist genre labels. I’d like to write a long poem that works somehow as a piece of theatre.

Q: Do you see yourself eventually branching out into other genres? So far, you’ve predominantly published poetry, but have been moving slowly into prose-specific projects. Or is genre something you see more fluid, attempting to incorporate structures from different systems into the scope of the poem?

A: I’ve been writing short fiction now for over a decade, mostly smut. I’ve just started a new collection of linked short stories. I like the idea of pushing the expected boundaries of genre and of fluidity. rather than any specific intent, I’m more interested in seeing what happens by being open.

Q: How does your poetry interact with your fiction? Do the genres converse, or are they entire separate?

A: Both require an ear. i read everything aloud to ensure it sounds right. i’ve written characters in poetry but fiction allows a deeper exploration of character than i have done in poetry.

in a few cases, I’ve had an image in mind that has recurred. I’ve written both poems and stories using that image. so poetry and fiction can interact for me. One of my poetry manuscripts, All the Catharines, features a character speaking to its author.

I read somewhere that poetry is not fiction, but I think it can be, in the sense that things can be made up. A recent poetry manuscript that I started called Grace, involves the character of a woman in her 50s. I’m using some of the techniques of fiction, specifically accumulation of details and pacing to create an impression of the whole character. A lot of narrative poems employ fiction characteristics, include character, plot, setting, etc. epics, for example. I think genre lines can blur.

The techniques of poetry have also informed my fiction, which fiction has become sparer too.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet; Walmsley’s Honeymoon in Berlin, What Happened; Je Nathanaël, Cixous’ Firstdays of the Year; Kroetch’s Completed Field Notes; Cooley’s The Bentleys; biographies and memoirs set in Paris between the wars or in New York in the 50s, stories of rebels. Kerouac’s On the Road...Victoria Finlay’s Travel Through the Paintbox, Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses...Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books.